To Warm up or not to warm up?
One of my clients told me a few weeks ago that she now feels like she is in “perma-warm”. That didn’t mean she didn’t need to warm up her body and voice, but rather that now she knows what to do so she can be efficient and focused and the voice responds quickly and thoroughly.
I love this.
Warm up is not the same as developing specific technical behavior.
Every athlete at every level of sport warms up AND develops specific technical skills. Singing is no different. Yes, I know there are some singers who say they don’t warm up. Perhaps it’s true. However, it doesn’t make it a good idea.
If warming up is good enough for Serena Williams or Misty Copeland it’s good enough for you!
Creating a ritual of warm up can be a welcome process to get mind, body and voice to focus and integrate for the task at hand. This can be for a practice session, a rehearsal or a performance. It can be as long or as short as you need in order to feel integrated to do what you are setting out to do.
Comparing your warm up to someone else’s is absolutely the wrong idea.
Discovering what your body, breath, vibration, mind needs to fully integrate is what is right for you. What you need to do, and how long it takes or doesn’t take is uniquely yours.
Think like an athlete, because you are one. Just because our discipline seems intangible does not dismiss the importance of warm up. In fact, it could be argued that because breath and vibration are seemingly intangible that the physical warm up is even more crucial!
Consider exploring the following:
how do you warm up your body?
how do you warm up your breath?
how do you focus your mind?
how do you balance all of these with the vibration you create?
“The neurotic singer” has become so cliché, and yet with every stereotype, there is some truth. Why the neurosis?
If you are at the gym, and stretching or observing the body’s range of motion before lifting (a-HA, that is part of the warm up!) you realize that your left hamstring feels really tight, you aren’t suddenly going to start screaming and leave the gym saying “I’m tight, I will never lift again!”
Yet, the “neurotic singer” brain does that. If something doesn’t quite “work” we are doomed!!
Spoiler alert: we are not doomed.
Warm up allows us to OBSERVE as we PREPARE for the task at hand. We can work from the general to the specific and this is as individual as the voice that resides in you. There isn’t something wrong with your voice. Due to the intangibility of our athleticism, the voice is simply trying to get your attention so you can focus on the physicality of warm up in order for the voice to respond differently.
Try observing with what Jason Bateman calls “sexy indifference” to the situation. (If you don’t listen to the podcast “Smartless” it’s time - and I am using that phrase A LOT lately!)
So let’s not make the questions to warm up or not to warm up? Let’s observe HOW we warm up and how efficient and perma-warm we can become so we can access what we need, when we need it, how we need it,.
If you call yourself a singer, an artist, an athlete, you deserve that.
with fondness & fierceness,